Gun Safety
by mercedeezbenzu
Summary: It never occurred to him that with his hands full he ran the risk of dropping something. First story, R&R!


His hands ghosted over his stomach, trailing up his chest and along his arm, as if they were searching for something. Mello eased into his touch, convinced it was just a touch, with no ulterior motives traveling underneath his partner's skin. But then Matt wrapped his fingers around the grip of his gun, which had been tucked beside Mello like a favorite stuffed animal, and he started to crawl over his body to put it away, far away in the vanishing darkness┘

Mello caught Matt by the elbow, making sure that his nails dug into his skin as he clenched on stopping him from dropping the gun in the open nightstand drawer. Finally Matt compromised by shoving it under Mello's pillow and settled back down. "There, happy?"

"Ecstatic."

"You should be. This way the gun fairy might stop by and leave you a quarter," Matt said, his voice grinning in the gloom as he molded himself to the curve of Mello's back.

Mello rolled his eyes. "You're an idiot."

"And you're fucking an idiot," Matt countered, kissing his way up his neck until he was hovering just above his ear where he whispered the cherry on top of his ridiculous banter. "That makes you an idiot lover."

Mello swatted at him when Matt's breath brushed against his neck and made his skin crawl in a way that was unfamiliar and thus infuriating to him. God forbid there be anything on the face of the earth that Mello couldn't identify, but he took great relief and satisfaction in the notion that Near wouldn't be able to either in his position, he'd be far worse off in fact, and that never failed to put Mello in a good mood. Otherwise he might've been more forceful about pushing Matt away. But he wasn't, and Matt didn't move, he even took the half-assed rejection as an invitation to further invade Mello's personal bubble with his wandering hands.

"It's okay if you are, though," Matt said after a moment, drumming his fingers on his hip. "An idiot lover I mean. I swear I won't tell anybody."

Mello just sucked his teeth and pretended to be annoyed. But the truth they both knew was that if Mello actually had any problem with Matt touching him, the gun was under his pillow where he could shoot anything off of Matt that he didn't need. Mello, after all, was not disinclined to violently dispose of anything that pissed him off. Instead he wrapped Matt around himself and flipped them over on the mattress, locking his lips with his own to make sure Matt didn't say anything stupid ever again for the rest of the night.

Sometimes it was just better to shut the fuck up. Rather than say what was completely unnecessary, dig deep inside and see what deformed little feelings they could understand enough to admit to, there was just no point to that.

But if they both got out of this game alive, then maybe there would be time for all of that excess chitchat. Maybe they'd stay up all night like a couple of teenage girls at a sleepover, braid each other's hair and talk about their thoughts and their feelings and all their dirty secrets too.

Like how Mello kept his gun close at all times not because he liked the hard profile of steel spooned against his body at night; then sneering at the well-defined grooves that were left temporarily imprinted on his skin in the morning to remind him of the bitter fact that he needed it like a small child needed the ripped and worn-out baby blanket they clutched onto for security. He was now accustomed to springing up in bed in the middle of the night and pointing his gun into the thick shroud of darkness whenever he thought he heard something stir: the rusted clinking of the radiator, the refrigerator clicking on and off in the other room┘the toilet flushing next door≈if his sweat-slicked finger ever slipped on the trigger he would end up assassinating the Bowser figurine that Matt kept on top of the VCR. Then the apartment would only be safe from princess-stealing koopas wearing studded S&M bracelets.

In the darkness everything sounded like a gun cocking, or the creak of unfamiliar footsteps on the floorboards always making their way closer to entering the bedroom every night. Mello never slept with both eyes shut anymore since the explosion and the leak of his real name, but sometimes he rested when Matt repositioned himself against him and cleared his nose loudly before wading back into the deep end of sleep. Sometimes Mello felt safe with him.

Safety was not just a state of mind. Only when he had his gun in one hand and Matt in the other did he felt confident that he could stretch his arms up and reach his goal. It never occurred to him that with his hands full he ran the risk of dropping something.


End file.
